June 6, 2007
Thomas Woodward, author of the new book Darwin Strikes Back: Defending the Science of Intelliigent Design turned up at the Washington D.C. offices of the Discovery Intstitute last night. Since it's alays nice to have an excuse to hang out in the big city, I decided to check it out. There's rather…
June 4, 2007
Let us end the day's blogging by noting this happy story from The Australian:
AN unholy war has erupted between a star of the US evangelical movement and his Australian flock, with claims of bullying and unbiblical behaviour.
Former NSW chief magistrate Clarrie Briese, who nearly brought down…
June 4, 2007
Meanwhile, the Gonzalez case continues. The President of ISU has turned down Gonzalez's appeal:
Because the issue of tenure is a personnel matter, I am not able to share the detailed rationale for the decision, although that has been provided to Dr. Gonzalez. But I can outline the areas of focus…
June 4, 2007
Meanwhile, writing in The New York Times, Senator Sam Brownback clarifies his views on evolution. Recall that Brownback was one of three Republican candidates to admit to rejecting evolution in a recent debate. He writes:
The premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not…
June 4, 2007
Meanwhile, the reviews of Michael Behe's new book The Edge of Evolution are starting to appear. Michael Ruse weighs in with a short review for The Globe and Mail. His verdict:
Although I am a hard-line Darwinian evolutionist and loathe and detest IDT, I have a grudging admiration for Darwin's…
June 4, 2007
Sorry for the light blogging lately. I'm furiously trying to finish up some writing projects that have been festering for a while. I'm a painfully slow writer, and there's a limit to how many hours a day I can stand pecking away at the computer. Alas, this state of affairs is likely to continue…
May 28, 2007
Tonight's edition of The O'Reilly Factor featured a discussion of the brand new creation museum outside Cincinnati. Guest host John Kasich was sitting in for Bill O'Reilly. Representing darkness and ignorance was creationist impresario Ken Ham, president of Answers in Genesis. On the side of…
May 24, 2007
Alexander Shabalov took clear first place in the just completed U.S. Championship. He scored seven points out of nine (six wins, two draws, one loss) in a field of 36 players.
For a while Shabalov seemed on course to match Bobby Fischer's mind-boggling 11 wins, no losses, no draws performance in…
May 24, 2007
From last night's Hardball:
MATTHEWS: OK. I want to get to your issue about mine-resistant equipment over there and armage (ph) equipment over there. But let me ask you this, first of all. Rudy Giuliani--he seems to get away with a lot of factual mistakes. He was on David Letterman the other…
May 23, 2007
And speaking of bad science journalism, here's Nature's take on the Gonzalez situation:
He's a young astronomer with dozens of articles in top journals; he has made an important discovery in the field of extrasolar planets; and he is a proponent of intelligent design, the idea that an intelligent…
May 23, 2007
The New York Times gives us sneak peek at the big Creation Museum opening in Kentucky this weekend:
The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any…
May 22, 2007
I only have time for quick blogging today, but we ought to tak a quick look this account, from The Washington Post, about Newt Gingrich's speech to the graduates at Liberty University:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich decried a “growing culture of radical secularism” Saturday morning as he…
May 21, 2007
Over at BeliefNet, Gregg Easterbrook writes the following:
Israelis and Palestinians are killing each other by the hundreds in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. Hindus and Muslims are slaughtering each other in India, herding neighbors into house or trains then setting them afire. Catholics and…
May 18, 2007
And now for something completely different.
As a high school freshman I was assigned to read a heavily abridged version of Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables. I loved it immediately. Later I resolved to procure a copy of the full, unabridged version, complete in all of its 1200+ page glory. I…
May 17, 2007
Two other items caught my eye while I was slumming over at Town Hall. First, here's William Rusher warning us all about the pernicious influence of junk science:
As regular readers know, I seldom review books in these columns, preferring to leave that important job to professional reviewers. But…
May 17, 2007
The next time you see someone criticize Richard Dawkins for not giving adequate treatment to the modal logic version of the ontological argument, remind him that this column, from Town Hall columnist Doug Giles, is far more representative of the depth of American religious thought:
Paul (not the…
May 17, 2007
Well, I guess it's about time I weighed in on the Gonzalez situation.
Guillermo Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, but he is best known as the coauthor (with Jay Richards) of The Privileged Planet, published by Regnery. Richards and Gonzalez present a novel, and especially vapid,…
May 15, 2007
Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of my call-up to the bigs! Since then I have done 339 posts and have received over 6100 comments. Seems like a good opportunity to thank Seed for putting together this little party, and to all the readers and commenters who have shamelessly enabled my…
May 15, 2007
I spent the day in Washington D.C. yesterday. My SciBlings Matthew Nisbet and Chris Mooney were speaking at the annual meeting of the AIBS (that's the American Institute of Biological Sciences). The subject: How to communicate science effectively.
They make a number of persuasive points, and I…
May 12, 2007
Since I'm criticizing my SciBlings today, permit me a few words about this post from Orli over at Neurontic.
Orli is unimpressed with the recent glut of atheist books. She begins by reproducing a segment from a previous post:
Dawkins and Dennett simply cannot understand the impulse to cling to an…
May 12, 2007
P.Z. Myers does not agree with my take on Mitt Romney's statement regarding evolution.
Now, I agree with P.Z. on about 99% of everything in life. But on this one, and on theistic evolution generally, he is way off.
Let's start with his title: “Mitt Romney, theistic evolutionist...and this is…
May 11, 2007
Matthew and Land look like Nobel Prize winners compared to Bill O'Reilly. He had Kirk Cameron on to discuss the vexing questtion of whether God exists. The video is available here. The interview opened with O'Reilly boasting of having defeated Richard Dawkins in their recent debate. Dawkins…
May 11, 2007
On yesterday's edition of the MSNBC chat show Hardball, host Chris Matthews had the following surreal discussion with Richard Land, President of the Southern Baptist Convention:
MATTHEWS: Let's get to it. On Broadway right now, "Inherit the Wind" is playing. I hear Christopher Plummer is…
May 11, 2007
According to Michael Luo at The New York Times blog, Mitt Romney has clarified his views on evolution. Here's the set-up:
Mitt Romney expanded on his belief in evolution in an interview earlier this week, staking out a position that could put him at odds with some conservative Christians, a key…
May 9, 2007
So I watched Nightline tonight, buoyed by the fact that the clips that appeared on the website earlier today were not too bad from the atheist standpoint (as I described here.) I should have known better. Having just watched the actual show, it is clear that they had no intention of giving any…
May 9, 2007
You really have to have a look at this column, from David Limbaugh, posted at Town Hall. It is simply not to be believed.
The title: Leftist Thought Control. I'd respond to Limbuagh's arguments but for the fact that he doesn't provide any. Instead he simply makes assertion after assertion about…
May 9, 2007
Robert Farley, writing at Tapped, has an excellent review of the new Spider-Man movie. I think he perfectly summarizes the film's good points and bad points. He makes the point, exactly right in my opinion, that it's not that Spider-Man III is unusually bad, it's that Spider-Man II was unusually…
May 9, 2007
If you have any interest, clips from the big Nightline God debate are now online at the ABC News website. Mostly what you'd expect, though I think things went a bit better for the atheists than I had anticipated.
Representing the forces of darkness and ignorance were Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort…
May 7, 2007
I saw Spider-Man Three this weekend. I liked it. A lot.
The critics have been panning it pretty severely, but they are wrong. They've been complaining that there is too much CGI, that there are too many supervillains, and that the story is unconvincing. Actually, I was impressed by how…
May 7, 2007
Last Thursday the American Enterprise Institute sponsored a debate on the subject of Darwinism and Conservatism. A video of the debate is available online, but I haven't had a chance to view it yet. In the meantime, I'll have to make do with this article from The New York Times.
Over the years…
